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How the Eight Steps Are Structured
Each chapter presents one of the eight steps and has the following structure:
- A scenario that shows ordinary people involved in abusive language interactions: husband and wife, parent and child, doctor and patient, teacher and student, mother and daughter-in-law, employer and employee.
- An analysis of the scenario that makes the basis for the conflict clear. And because the people involved in verbal confrontations rarely agree on what they are really about, the analysis includes the personal veiwpiont of each of the characters in the scenario.
- One or more language techniques specifically designed to deal with the conflict shown in the scenario.
- A return to the scenario, to show how use of the technique just introduced would have changed it for the better.
- A set of backup exercises and activities, plus carefully chosen quotations--Sight Bites--from various sources, to help you put all of this information to use in your own life.
You Can't Say that to Me:
Stopping the Pain of Verbal Abuse -- An 8-Step Program
page vii
One of the first and most basic steps we can take to avoid misunderstanding and hostility, either in brief encounters or in chronic difficult situations, is to put into practice a rule known as Miller's Law.
In order to understand what another person is saying,
you must assume that it is true and
try to imagine what it could be true of.
(G. Miller 1980, p. 46)
That is: Assume--not accept, just assume--that the other person's words are true, and try to imagine what they could be true of. In what kind of reality would they be true? What would be happening? What else would have to be true if they were true?
You Can't Say that to Me:
Stopping the Pain of Verbal Abuse -- An 8-Step Program
pages 17-18
Many strategies that have been proposed for dealing with verbal abuse in a relationship actually feed the hostility and make it grow. These results have misled people, causing them to conclude that because those methods don't work, nothing will.
It's unfortunate that many of the methods taught for dealing with verbal abuse actually make it worse; that's not what the writers and teachers intended to have happen. The problem is that their methods are based not on contemporary linguistic science but on folklore, outdated concepts and misconceptions. Look at the following quotation, which is the closing sentence from a story about verbal abuse in the October 12, 1992, issue of Newsweek magazine:
More often than not...a truce will fail to hold,
and the only way for the verbal victim to become the
victor is to have the last word: goodbye.
(Jean Seligmann et al., "The Wounds of Words," p. 92)
This is typical; and it shows that the basic facts about verbal abuse are still not understood. As long as the communication goal in a relationship is to establish one person as the "victor" (winner) and the other as the loser, no positive change is ever going to be possible. This crucial misunderstanding of the facts makes the best-intentioned attempts to teach techniques for change useless, and the result is a series of failures which support the myth that nothing can be done.
You Can't Say that to Me:
Stopping the Pain of Verbal Abuse -- An 8-Step Program
pages 65-66
[from the softbound edition]
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